Through Bossman Eyes Makes You Walk In The Shoes Of The Man Behind The Counter

Rikaz Niyas’ Through Bossman’s Eyes is a short film that follows the day of a South Asian corner shopkeeper in Harrow, Northwest London. Winner of LADbible’s ‘Pitch Your Story’ partnership with Young Arrows, Merman and the Race Equality Foundation, the film voices the inner thoughts of a man grappling with not belonging to a place he calls home. He works hard, tends to his customers with care and curiosity, and doesn’t take his life for granted. Yet, he is continuously told that he doesn’t belong there, with people spray-painting exactly that on his shop shutter.

Talking about why he chose the corner shop and its owner as the setting of his film, Niyas says, “There’s something really interesting about how familiar the corner shop owner is to us, but how little we might actually know about him. We call him ‘bossman’, we see him regularly, we might have a laugh with him, but how often do we stop and think about his life outside that interaction? That felt like a really strong starting point. The corner shop is also somewhere so many different lives cross over. People from different backgrounds and generations all walk through the same door.” And the film does reflect that. There are a slew of customers, also mostly from the diaspora, forging a camaraderie with this bossman. Helping one of them fix a tie, listening to petty squabbles between two friends, or watching a wedding party come in for some refreshments.

Bossman is the eyes of the operation, a silent spectator. He is also the eyes of this film. “I wanted audiences to spend time with him, listen to him and get a sense of the person behind the counter. Through his voice, his humour and his everyday experiences, we could explore those bigger questions about belonging.” The camera stays with him, tracking as though we are the thoughts in his brain, sometimes coherent, sometimes erratic. The film has an inherent rawness that comes from this. And most importantly, it feels personal.

Niyas and his crew shot the film on the very road he grew up on. So, for him, it was almost like a homecoming. In the past few years, we have seen a rise in the hatred directed towards immigrants and people of colour across Europe, especially England. An incredibly poignant scene in the film shows a news channel broadcasting a slew of protests against immigrants, with protesters asking them to "go back to where they came from". The chaos of the store goes quiet, with everyone’s attention directed towards the television, until Bossman promptly switches it off. Throughout the film, it is evident that he is not a man who wavers; he is the lighthouse amid the storm.

Niyas’ upbringing heavily influenced the particular story in the film. Being born in Sri Lanka and growing up in Britain, the need to continually prove that he belonged was omnipresent. The film feels like a love letter to his community and a message of hope to the people who are very often pushed to the sidelines of society when they try to move up the social or economic ladder. As he puts it, “I wanted to tell a story about the people behind those conversations. People with families, a sense of humour, routines and relationships, whose lives rarely get the same attention as the headlines about them. I wanted people who recognise it (the world he grew up in) to feel seen, and people who don’t to spend a couple of minutes seeing it through someone else’s eyes.”

Watch the movie here and follow Niyas on Instagram.

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